Let's see once and for all if we can spot the 'high level Korean play' we talk so much about.

EDIT: Thinking about it, barcodes wouldn't really work - aliases would be better, even if we just assigned each player a colour for the whole tournament. This colour is their name, and their team colour in-game.

Seriously tho, this format has been talked about quite a few times and no one has ever put it to the test.. Who better, than Destiny, who claimed that the average viewer can't tell between NA pro and KR pro.. Would be really, really interesting to see.

I appreciate the quasi-suggestion(?), I know I've talked a lot about doing this in the past, but I'm very adamant that the first tournament I do is a "boring", straight-up tournament. I want to make sure I can run an ordinary tournament properly before I deviate and do anything crazy. I'm also curious what the viewership numbers will be like for something that isn't featuring a "gimmick", so to speak.

I understand your intentions, but on the other side having a gimmicky first tournament would rise the awareness to you as tournament host. It'd certainly get more attention and hence give you more viewers for non-gimmick tourneys in the future.

I'm also curious what the viewership numbers will be like for something that isn't featuring a "gimmick", so to speak.

To a point. Anything with your name on it or with you affiliated with it is going to have a bit of "gimmick" factor by nature (in terms of it greatly skewing numbers of people tuning in.) No way around that though.

Adding to what afito said, I think if your first tournament is but one in a sea of 'normal', small tournaments so you should rely more than just your pulling power to make it through. Having these interesting 'gimmicks' definitely adds a lot to the current, getting-stale formula of small tournaments, and there are very little reasons to do an 'experiment' instead of doing the real deal.

That's fine but then doesn't that somewhat defeat the purpose of having a brainstorm/ ideas thread in the first place? What possible ideas could we give that would fall in line with a "boring, straight-up tournament" that you probably haven't thought of yourself such as "invite X player" or cast with "Y caster" etc.

Good idea, but there would have to be some sort of live votes on who it is during the games, because once a game is over it will be figured out pretty quickly on the forms by swarm-knowledge on build orders and playstyles.

Ppl playing detective and finding out which of the players is Flash because he places his factory in a certain way: that is completely cool and still uncertain. It could be Impact trying to fool everybody or smth alike. Other things, that could give the ID awAy need to be hidden tho. Like Control groups for example.

For me, the identity of the players is just as big a part in the entertainment value as the games themselves. Heck, I even enjoy just reading the scores of big tournaments. I guess it's just difficult for me to feel empathy with a competitor that I know very little about.

I think some online tournament used this anonymity concept in one form or another?

Races can be used when not mirror match-ups. Not too awkward in that case. But mirrors will be awkward. "Blue zerg is morphing banelings right in front of red zerg's base! We are about to see some ling micro now, guys!"

But as long as you show all the possible players in the beginning (assuming you have really big names) to keep the viewers guessing. I remember watching a GSL mini-tournament (I think) with bar coded names and wasn't sure whether to watch or not.

Imagine a Protoss drawing a heart with their probe and going on to win, only to be revealed as....Naniwa?!

Obviously a lot of the storyline would emerge after the tournament has finished, but with the ideas suggested below (I especially like the voting system) I think we could make up for it, and make something really unique.

High risk, but potentially high reward. There's a chance some people will be bored not knowing who is playing. On the other hand, the idea itself is very interesting. We'll have to see his thoughts on this.

Since you're looking to make a more serious tournament, would you consider inviting some lesser known Koreans? SKT Dark, KT Stats, and many other very talented Koreans are stuck on the Proleague bench in between GSL seasons, and it would be great to see underrated koreans playing underrated foreigners.

THe problem with that, would be that better known Koreans and/or more skilled Koreans woud attract a bigger audience, don't get me wrong, I love stats and would definitely watch for him, but I'm not sure if he is able to attract a really big audience, like players like Zest and Flash and JaeDong and so on.

The positive thing about this however, would be that you wouldn't need to have as much prizepool if you were to invite Koreans that don't get the chance to do anything but proleague and/or dont even get send out that much in proleague.

So as always there is a positive and a negative to it.

But depending on Destiny's prizepool those names could keep his level of competition really high without wanting BIG amounts of money.

I vaguely remember Destiny speaking on a show, probably Unfiltered, about how awesome a tournament would be if no one knew who the players were until they were eliminated. That probably wont happen this tournament but it would be interesting. I do understand Destiny wrote, "no gimmicks", but it would be pretty awesome :P. Either way I am hyped for this.

This group will be called the group of death for it will have the most amazing games, games so powerful Bisu will awaken in his grave and return to the 2 thrones of Protoss, to sit once again next to Stork, his old comrade in lasers!

Lol I know Bisu won't return, they didn't do enough with him, and Bisu is a really emotional etc. player, he actually took long vacations from playing after big losses because his coach knew he wouldn't perform at all, because it just threw him of soo much (no other player was allowed to not play for a time while having his team contract, especially not star players).

So after stuff not going his way at the beginning (and the year he came back to was the smallest year for the Korean SC2 scene soo that made him feel bad aswell) he probably got thrown off and decided it was not worth it, and decided to go back to BW.

But hey if it is good for him, and I still watch everytime he plays, because i just love him SOOO much.

I just hoped he would Innovate SC2 and help the level of play in SC2 <3

Go back and take a look at TB's original ShoutCrafts from before he moved stateside and read his postmortems on each. Some good lessons in those I think, as they were quite barebone and ghetto. Or if possible, hit him up for an informal chat on his experiences when he has recuperated. Hell, do it on-stream and monetize it, make it part of making the viewers invested in the tournament. A good old TB rant is bound to attract a crowd.

Delegate, be careful not to take on too much yourself. If the budget permits, have a third analytical caster. Someone who can analyze games, someone you can switch to between games and act as your 'analyst desk'. The role could be both hindsight analysis and to introduce and talk a bit about the next players, games and groups. With a low budget production it's good to have the option to switch to something other than the casters or commercials. Personally I'd say people like Nathanias or DeMuslim would be good for this role, but could really be almost any pro player(s) of relevant races, who has a bit of personality.

If you don't get an analyst and you're not going the gimmick route, you're going to have to do Apollo-level preparation. Know the Meta, each player, their teams, current and historic stats, match-ups, maps etc.

Let the community get involved and invested in the tournament. For the first iteration at least, accept donations to the prize-pool.
Brainstormed ideas include; a kickstarter, a raffle(Feenix?), a funding with benchmarks, an all out community funding inspired by the DOTA2 compendium or for the month leading up to the tournament, let all new subscribtions to destiny.gg go directly to the prize-pool.
Maybe mix it up and fund it with a raffle with prizes based on benchmarks. That could even be a recurring theme for future tournaments. Make the community feel they are part of the tournament, not that they are watching 'your tournament' but that they have a vested interest in it.

Include a tipjar. Look at TB's experiences with this. There has to be some kind of incentive for players who qualify via the NA ladder or you will risk no-shows. It also adds to the communitys vested interest in the tournament.

Casters

Be very conscious about your choice of co-casters. You seem to want to branch out a bit and widen your target audience, however you can't risk alienating people by deviating too far from what they expect from you as a brand, unless you're looking to take your brand in a completely new direction.
Personally I'd say your best partner would be incontrol. Your casts at HomeStory with players, where you would engage with them by asking for their views and input were also very good, so there are of course possibilities there as well. All-in-all it seems risky to have different casters on each day.

A casting duo, casting over skype, with no personal history or experience working together is often detrimental to a tournament. It's painful browsing streams, stumbling on a tournament to see a co-caster on a minecraftesque webcam talking into a warbled, echoey headphone-mic.

Accept/Invite community casters for languages where people are inclined not to follow english speaking casters such as; TOD/French, Take/German, Axiom/Korea, ?/Chinese. They might not be your target audience and will not be of any use to usual sponsors, but there is no point in excluding them if someone else is willing to pitch in.

Last but definitely not least. If at all possible, arrange it so that you and your co-caster are in the same room. It might just be a pet peeve of mine, but I find it affects the quality of the cast enormously.

Gimmicks

At first I thought you made the wrong decision on this, especially considering the vocal part of your followers, a very 'special' demographic. However, after having given it some thought, I see how casting a wider net, expanding your brand and appealing to a wider audience is the smart thing to do. Further, your choice to "do something well" before deviating, is a spot on approach.
Still though, I can't help but think a full-retard gimmick tournament with a proper prize-pool would be hilarious. Coin-flipped off-races, all barcodes, BM banter, crass humour, odd maps, loser has to play Avilo with Avilo commenting.

When someone says old I think of scrap station, tal'darim altar, shattered temple, shakuras plateu, xel naga caverns, metalopolis and steppes of war etc... Cloud Kingdom seems like it was only yesteday...

Awesome call on the gimmicks, but would you consider not using not maps from the current ladder pool only? There are some really good older maps (Bel'shir vestige, Daybreak, Newkirk Precinct for instance) and surely there must be some really good TE maps floating around? I'm watching a fair deal of SCII (and will of course tune in to your tournament as you are one of my fave SCII personalities) and I'm getting pretty tired of seeing frost, then seeing habitation, then playing on frost while there is some PvP on habitation, then frost again...

The format for the group stage is a little confusing to read (unless I missed something in the post - if so, then just ignore this comment). I assume that you want to have all four players in a group play each other in best of 3s, making for a total of 6 best of 3s. But you haven't said anywhere if that's the case (although it is implied), and when you explicitly give the group stages:

The shoutcraft invitational was great, and it looks like you've taken a lot of inspiration from it. Something TB highlighted in his post-mortem was how much of a success they had with the chinese audience. The cooperation with NeoTV seemed like it contributed significantly to overall viewer numbers and provided further incentive for a sponsor who was looking for exposure in the chinese market. Sounded like it would be worth looking into, especially if you are trying to drum up sponsors.

This is exactly the kind of tournament I've always wanted to see. It's perfectly set up for either or both good foreigners making it far through matches in which they are the underdog, and top tier games with the highest level players. Both are the kind of games that get hyped more than any other as far as I've seen.

The trick is to attract the top koreans with a substantial prize pool. Which means whatever avenue of funding you aim for has to be really well put together. I personally think a crowdfunded effort with seriously cool funding rewards and stretch goals would be great. Stretch goals being things like what HSC did with a broodwar showmatch, or maybe a little more budget allocated for production, or specific casters. I have no idea how realistic any of these specific things are, but I'm sure this thread will be full of awesome ideas for things that can be made into stretch goals.

Tier rewards like showmatches and such are cool, and I'm not saying that it's a bad crowdfunding concept, but (if I'm a cheap bastard) I might almost just as well cross my fingers and hope that the rest of the community gets us there. And if we're far off from a goal, then I would feel like my contribution wouldn't do much to get us to that tier. It feels a lot like charity - it's cool and all, but it might not be the best incentive.

I'm thinking that the best crowdfunding rewards are things that you don't get for free. Maybe have extended chat functions for funders. Maybe have some downloadable content like a wallpaper or whatever. Just have some low cost shit that acknowledges the individual contribution as opposed to the community's contribution.

You're right, which means that in addition to good stretch goals, there need to be good funding rewards. Maybe 4 dollar funding for a subscription, as opposed to 5 dollars in the stream, as a low level one. Just a minor discount to get the event funded ahead of time, in addition to your ideas. An easy and cheap high level funding reward could be a copy of HOTS signed by all players and Destiny. (nevermind, forgot that it's an online event. Still doable, but less easy than I thought)

I think you are doing about everything right with this one. Personally I hugely prefer to watch top foreigners play vs top koreans instead of just mass top koreans.

The prize pool distribution sounds good and I believe you should use some crowd funding approach. Maybe you can learn some stuff from the nationwars guys in that regard and put in some stretch goals like 4v4 or stuff like monobattles with the players or specific "high tier" casters. I know... no gimmicks but that would be somewhat around the tournament and not really for the tournament itself.

if this is successful, you could consider to involve the top 4 or top 8 of the EU ladder for the next time as well. You would get top high tier koreans this way as well but you also get the additional storylines of players representing their servers.

if you will be accepting community casters id be happy to provide a german stream

Do what Dota 2 does, and let fans donate money to be put into the prize pool. You can set it up via your subscription system, or a separate donation pool, or for some cheesy product. HOW you want to get the money doesn't matter, just let fans boost the prize pool.

In your post, you mention that you want to pay $100 for a bilingual admin and that you have a list of different co-casters you want to invite.
Is there anything that volunteers would be able to help out with?

I don't think so. I just need art and an admin. I hate the idea of volunteers, I think if you're working for something that's turning a profit you should be getting at least some slice of it, however small.

Maybe put in the tournament fine print that no showing means you give up all money earned so that the player ends up with nothing if it happens. (Though if the prize money isn't that much, taking it away might not deter someone)

If you're really concerned with it happening have some sort of back up plan. Maybe the top 10 make it into the tournament with the last 2 on standby. If it happens in the group stage, the no show is kicked and replaced.

I don't think there's much you can do to recoup lost money once it happens. If they don't show you get no games. You've got to try and stop it from happening in the first place.

I must admit i dont really get it, you have talked a long time about making a tournament that was different from all the others, yet you plan to include none of the gimmics you talked about. I fear a little that it will just be "another tournament on the list" id like to see Destiny funcast, not just another Korean winner tourney.

We actually don't get to see KeSPA Koreans (which are the top Koreans) play against foreigners all that often, with this tournament he would not only have a really freaking high level of play, higher than for example the last MLG probably, but would also give other players (people that play in WCS EU or NA since im not sure many KR would play on NA Ladder for that long of a time) a chance to compete with those, we don't get to see them play each other so it is actually kinda unique.

Since the season finals got cancelled I always wanted this to happen, and Destiny makes it happen so for me this is going to be a really fun tournament.

Also I dont mind seeing KeSPA Koreans win shit, they desserve it and most of my favorite players during SC2, and all of them during SC:BW are KeSPA Koreans.

When someone is knocked out play a generic RIP animation and have a moment of silence

Instead of having a score at the top it should be a REKT that fills up for the loser (maybe only do this for the group stage to keep Ro8 serious)

The people who win their group should get to pick their opponent for the Ro8

A 2v2 between you and whoever is casting with you (off race) against two random subs in your chat

Accept donations and allow donators to have a message appear at the top of your screen, minimum $2 for the message to appear.

Do polls for who to invite but separate it into three different polls for each race obviously (balloon should be an option on every poll since hes random)

A marathon stream session (days or weeks before tournament) lasting at least 24 hours where you plug the shit out of this tournament and its sponsors. I'd like to see something like you off racing as Terran, 2v2s with chad, a few games of DotA or LoL, or arcade games with subs. This would be a good day to use the donation message idea.

Why would you call it "The Destiny Invitational" when only half the player are invited? It's the "Destiny.gg Tournament" so people know where to go to watch.

For the invites, are you going for KeSPA Koreans who would laughably dominate the event or just players like Polt and TaeJa who would simply dominate?

Have you thought about racial balance? There currently are only two Terrans at all in the top 20 GM for NA so you'd have a real risk of having nothing but Protoss and Zergs outside of invites.

Bo5 semis and Bo7 finals is sufficient. Bo9 approaches too much of a good thing especially if you run it on the same day as two Bo7 semis.

I hope you are prepared for a fluid schedule as a Bo3 can easily take an hour and a Bo7 can run over 2 hours not even counting breaks and game setup. I think the Flash vs herO Bo7 SanDisk finals was closer to 3 hours real-time and that was without a Game 7.

You should also prepare recorded b-roll and interviews to fill downtime. At least an hour's worth of 2 to 5 minute videos including player interviews, analysis of each player's preferred style, humorous bits like the Unfiltered remixes, etc.

Qualifiers are placed in groups based first on racial balance and then by random draw.

Groups are Bo3 round-robin with FFA tie-breakers.

Group winners move to a playoff bracket with Bo5 Semi-Finals and a Bo7 Final.

You could do two groups a day making the event a bit less spread out with clear storylines of the top NA ladder representatives taking on the Koreans and qualifiers. You'd also avoid the anti-hype of repeating the storyline of "invited Korean wins" 24 times in group stage followed by an all-Korean playoffs.

Plus if this becomes a regular event you could have a more distinct tournament based on the invites, for example "the one with MC, Polt, and HyuN" followed by "the one with HerO, MKP, and DRG" followed by "the one with Stork, Flash, and JD" and so on.

You could still do the occasional super-tournament, perhaps twice a year, with bigger groups and 6 or more Korean invites.

what we're all wondering, is how much of this will follow through. I feel like you need someone else to hop along - might be too much to take it all on yourself. I think you need someone(s) to get on board with you.

lots of grass-roots events/tourneys have happened in the past and have failed to be consistent. I think some of the things to consider are :
a) casters. mentioned this in another related reddit thread. having 2-3 quality casters seems to be a must.

b) quality of players. not just Koreans, but players that would produce potential matchups that people would want to see. I would love to see Avilo vs anyone for example. (perhaps a vote like GAME-ON)

Get a ton of low tier prizes, t-shirts, blizzard stuff, carbot shirts, twitch stuff, maybe even some sc2 team related stuff donated. Have people donate during the tournament by betting 1 dollar on the winner of a series. You randomly select winners after each series/match (depends on amount of stuff you get) who guessed the correct winner to receive a prize. All proceeds go to increasing the prize pool? Maybe split the money giving half to the player the community predicts to win? Slightly a gimmick, but if you plan to do a kickstarter this may be a better way to raise money. Mailing all the prizes may be pricey. Unless blizz makes it so you can award custom sc2 destiny avatars to winners there isn't much else you can do if you go this route.

If it proves profitable, may I suggest testing out a new format? Smaller tournaments that are quarterly or semi annual. Each one has a particular characteristic/gimmick.

For example, the idea that's floating around here of an alias tournament would fit perfectly. A player list is made public for advertising purposes, but players receive an alias upon tournament commencement and are not revealed until they are eliminated.

Other ideas include:

Starbow

Off Race

WoL (maps/full game)

Funday Monday style - players have to fulfill a criteria/constraint that is drawn from a hat. Players do not know their opponent's draw, casters know both. Players draw their play when the previous match starts and they have that time to plan and practice a build.

Stream marathon, stream sc2 all day or even day Z if more people want to watch that. spam alot of commercials, make it so people can donate to the prize pool, once the prize pool is big enough to attract high level koreans, invite flash , jd , stork ... lots of terrans and zergs and barely any protosses

I love the smix bashing at the end of the blog destiny...this has bothered me so often when people ask really specific questions and then they get an answer like "i just tryed my best and it worked out" or some shit!

Destiny, I never had really been a huge fan of you. But I am impressed that you may actually put the thought and time into trying to revive SC2. I look forward to seeing this tournament in action, and I hope I can change my mind about you. Thanks for doing this.

Hey Destiny, while it's not a concern for the success of your tournament, I LOVE the idea that your suggested format would encourage non-NA players to compete on the NA ladder. Obviously the prizepool might not be substantial enough to get the top KESPA players laddering on NA, but I could see the foreign and non-KESPA Koreans thinking this is an easy way into some money. Giving our NA pros much better practice.

It's things like this that make me jealous of Dota2's tournament setup.

I wonder what it would be like if there was a "DotaTV" type thing in Starcraft. Where for 5$ or something you could buy a Destiny Invitational ticket that let you support a player (that would show in game like Dota), give you something in game exclusive to the Tournament (a skin or icon, etc) and would let you watch in game. Basically a straight up rip off of what Dota2 has. It could provide that extra cash for the prize pool.

Sad thing is that I don't think it could happen unless the rebuilt the entire client :(

75% of that money goes to Valve though, which is a huge portion of possible donations. Valve is also planning on requiring at-least a 10k prizepool for items to be bundled with tickets. That fucks with smaller tournaments, since the item is a big part of the ticket's appeal.

So while there are a lot of good coming from it, its not all roses. I think with some legwork Destiny can make crowd-funding work with 3rd party resources.

Why not try to raise some funds The Invitational style (LoL/dota) where everyone can donate to the prize pool? might not get 6mil, but you'll probably at least get something to contribute to the prize pool

*What if the the players chose each others races for them? It would be a 'who's better at Starcraft 2 in general' type of thing.

*Put the name of the tournament up for a bid, as many times as I've seen people pay tons of money to the humble bundles and random donations on stream, I'd be suprised if you didn't get $1k+. You could do this for your art slides too.

Instead of inviting 8 Koreans and 8 Top US Ladder players, why not just invite the Top 16 in the ladder? This way, you are bound to get a good handful of NA players and you would lessen the issue that the good Korean players rarely practice outside the Korean ladder (which is what the players in EU tend to complain about).

If you are allowing anybody to qualify via the NA ladder, and this tournament isn't region locked...how can you say that you will have 8 koreans and 8 foreigners. What happens if the top 8 of NA ladder are just people like Hyun, Forgg, etc...

It would be interesting to see a change in the group format, perhaps OSL style groups. That way we'd get to see everyone in the groups play everyone else. The obvious downsides are three way ties and meaningless matches, but you can pretty easily mitigate the meaningless matches with $50 for the people that take third in their groups.

I like the top comments ideas. I'm just spit balling here and I don't know shit about MOBAS, but that compendium thing sounds incredible. Is it possible to work with Blizz and have everyone that pays 10 bucks toward the tournament to get like Top hats and monocles for their marines, zerglings and zealots? And then maybe have 2 custom maps with units and structures designed entirely in Carbots Starcrafts look.

If DOTA 2 is any indication, people will eat that shit up. 4 bucks to blizz for facilitating all of it, 2 bucks to the prize pool and 2 bucks to you directly, and then the other 2 for taxes/fees I guess?

I know, people will say "but I'm a broke college student, if I pay 10 bucks for that then I'm out of my weekly Ramen ration!", but the average age and amount of disposable income available is higher for SC2 players than DOTA players right?

You could do something where you ask a few of the SC2 personalities if they'd cast for/with you during the games if they were voted for by the community and then charge some fairly trivial fee for votes (like $2 or something) with 100% of the funding from that going towards prize pool.

May spur community involvement and fund raising, as well as making people invested in the tournament (literally and through the effect below):Effort justification (wiki)

Effort justification is an idea and paradigm in social psychology stemming from Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. Effort justification is people's tendency to attribute a greater value (greater than the objective value) to an outcome they had to put effort into acquiring or achieving.

So basically come watch 8 NA GMs get shit on by 8 top Koreans? It kinda seems like a miniature WCS America in that regard.

Seems weird to call it an invitational when half the spots go to qualifiers. Why not just invite 16 players you want to see play? Or conversely, why not just make it all qualifiers like Shoutcraft and don't call it an invitational.

One big motivator I think for players trying to qualify for Shoutcraft was that they knew that if they qualfied, they'd be playing just the other blokes on ladder and that really any 16 of them had a chance to win it. If you tell them instead that upon qualifying they're going to facing 2 high level Koreans and that if they lose they don't get any money, I bet that feels a lot less enticing.

Of course it's still an opportunity to gain fans, get exposure, "build their brand", etc. but at the end of the day I'm a cold hard cash kinda guy. I like to see players get money.

Also I think Homestory Cup has the best ratio of foreigner scrubs to top level Koreans, about 3:1.

So basically come watch 8 NA GMs get shit on by 8 top Koreans? It kinda seems like a miniature WCS America in that regard.

EU or KR could qualify via the ladder.

And if the ladder qualifiers are bad, they'll be eliminated before the championship bracket is even set up.

Why not just invite 16 players you want to see play? Or conversely, why not just make it all qualifiers like Shoutcraft and don't call it an invitational.

I don't like 100% invitational tournaments because it stifles new talent. I don't want to do all qualifiers because I DO want some top Koreans here and I don't feel like running 4 qualifiers or however it would take for it to happen.